Daily Software Development

So it probably took me 15 seconds to track down this error in my code, and those wasted seconds, while very minor, are exactly why I wish Visual Studio or ReSharper or some program would alert me to what I've mistakenly done. It is easy with some methods to throw away a return value without noticing.

If I am calling a method which has a return value I am ignoring, it might be nice if it made it a little more obvious I am doing so. Perhaps an underline with a note explaining that I am not processing a return value. Sure lots of people ignore return values all the time, but they really shouldn't be. The return value probably exists for a reason.

Looking at that code it is pretty easy to miss the fact that I am not doing anything with the return value. Right now the value written to the console is "LongStringWithTooMuchStuffSoItProbablyNeedsToBeCutDownToSize". I am just ignoring the value that substring is returning. This means I am not actually doing anything. I am just printing out the original string. What I really should have written is this.

It wouldn't be that difficult for a program to detect unused return values. I am already informed when I don't use variables. Since plenty of plug-ins for visual studio already read method signatures, one of them could easily detect that I am ignoring the return value of that method. Ah the little things. Not too big a deal, but kind of annoying since I executed my program once and had to look to see why my code didn't work as expected.

Maybe some program does mention this already, or maybe there is some setting I need to enable to do this. Please let me know if you know of one.